Top Email Marketing Strategies: Crafting Engaging Content That Converts

Welcome to the Marketing and Margaritas Podcast. I'm Madeline and I'm Ruby. If you're a startup or a scale-up looking for actionable and profitable advice, then this is a podcast for you. We will give you a taste of our prudent insights and strategies that we've applied to hundreds of businesses to help them grow, scale and succeed. So grab your margaritas and your pen and paper because we're here to show you that with the right strategy, your idea and our marketing guidance, you can take your brand from startup to stand out. Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing and Margaritas Podcast. My name is Ruby and I'm joined by my co-host, Maddie. Maddie, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. Now, are we going to talk about the subscribe on the episodes? Absolutely. We don't want to be one of those podcasts that plug these, but they have just dropped last week. So, if you haven't already seen the first one, it is out and it is ready for you to subscribe. So we'll just leave it at that. Yeah. Go and have a look. We've dropped our first one and we're super excited to be offering you these affordable masterclasses to a month by myself and Ruby. Yeah. There's no lock-in so you can even try see how you like it. And if for some weird random reason you don't like it, you can cancel. Yeah. Love that. Otherwise, let's get into the episode. Maddie, what are we talking about today? Now, I have a lot of gibberish here on my piece of paper, but I'm pretty much going to give you a little bit around email marketing today. Love it. Thank you, Spoke. We haven't done an email marketing episode in a little while. Yeah. And some people were asking for it. So I wanted to give maybe like a first episode, maybe we can touch more an email now after this, more around strategies as a top line level, and then maybe we can go deeper in the next few. Yeah. Love it. So first thing I want to touch on is Google and Yahoo, earlier this year in April, got really strict on some of their rules. And a lot of them might not apply to small businesses because it's for people who send around 50,000 or more emails a day. So your bigger accounts, but if you do have an email list of around 8,000 though, you could hit that 50,000 a day if you're doing multiple campaigns a day or you're band and cart flow, you're welcome flows, they all count as sending emails. But one big thing which Google and, sorry, Gmail and Yahoo, are getting really funny on is your spam limit. And really, where we want to be sitting is at 1%. So this is when people unsubscribe from your email and if they click that, you'll spam me. Then this goes against your kind of send a score and against your account. And this will mean that your deliverability will go down. So we really want to make sure that when we're doing our email marketing strategy, that we're looking at how we can make sure we're not just sending out an email to every single person. Yeah. We're going to talk about some simple strategies here and what I like to do around my lists as well, because lists are really important. People don't understand segmentation and lists cleaning is really, really important. Okay. So Ruby, let's talk about some strategies for creating engaging content. Now the first thing I want to touch on is every email doesn't have to convert to sales. A lot of the time, people get really caught up with every email has to have a goal of sales. But we actually have other goals that we do for our clients. And we have emails that go out every month that their goal is to improve our send a score. And a send a score can be improved by obviously people opening it, people clicking on it, but people replying to it. Yes. So if people reply to your email, that is like the golden nugget. So Ruby spoke about people sharing your Instagram as a golden nugget. And email people replying to your emails is so gold. So we try every month or every six weeks to have an email in there where people reply to it. And normally that is with some sort of incentive. So reply to, to get a code or reply to, to get a free product or reply to expires, yeah. I actually did this recently and I taught this in, I love how much we give away on these podcasts. So this is something I gave to my client and I implemented it in my business and then they've carried it out and it's worked really, really well. But I'm going to share with you guys too. This should be on the sub, sorry, the subscriber only episode. Well, yeah, I was thinking I'll probably do one on really deep diving to email. Yeah. But what I did was I just created a plain text, what do you call it? Yes, plain text. I've got that on my mouth. First year. Sorry, I hope I'm not jumping in the jungle. Probably. But let's do it. I don't have a space. So hopefully it's just like covering, no, I've got something for you, Gary and I'll add. No, no, no. You go. Okay. You can tell we don't plan these episodes. I don't know. I don't know. Like you go. This is my episode. So I don't really want to lie to you. But basically, and this is just long story short, the strategy. I've just babbled on for so long here, but basically it was saying like, hey, many last week I recorded a training with my clients. I love to send it to you. I thought, I thought of you. So you're basically making it sound like you wrote the email to them. Yep. If you want to see it and I'll shoot it straight through, like yeah, super, again, super, like conversational style, use slang if that works for your brand and it worked a bloody treat. Yes. Love that. I'll go on to plain text in a minute. Yeah. I do love that. So we spoke about what is your goal of your email? So we might have reply into getting people to click. Yeah. So making sure like whatever action you're wanting them to do in the click, then doing it. And people get caught up that it needs to go to your shop. No. What we've been seeing is a lot of people, and I did TikTok on this, a lot of people clicking on the TikTok icon on the bottom. Yeah. And I found that really weird. I'm like, oh, I haven't had such an uplift in people hitting the TikTok, which means people, this is like for e-commerce. I think people for this brand specifically that it happened to were wanting to like see recipes and a bit more about info. So I was like, why do we see TikTok videos throughout the email and our goal is to get people to click out to our TikTok totally. Totally. And maybe they'll follow it. They'll give a post, but see how that email isn't directly related to our goal is to get a sale. Our goal is to get people to click to our TikTok. Totally. We did it once or there. Well, we're doing it currently with a physio client at the moment. Yeah. And their goal is to build their Instagram. So every month, it's like, what can we do to entice people to come over to their Instagram? Correct. So we run a giveaway. Yeah. We've done like send us a message on Instagram to get a 10% off discount, like actually encouraging them to come across the Instagram to get the follow, but it obviously increases your click through rate too. Yeah. And people forget email marketing as a way of doing other actions like we were just saying they always think it's just about sales. And if it is just about sales, you probably won't get, you'll get that spam rate or you won't get any sales because people will feel like it's spammy and promotional and they'll unsubscribe. So what I want you to do is firstly map out on a Google spreadsheet or an Excel, the goals. Yeah. So, okay. One email a month is just literally to get people to reply. One email a month is going to get people to my TikTok or Instagram or Pinterest. Whatever the hell you're trying to grow. Yeah. The next one is like podcasts. Yeah. Write that out. And then I want you to think about just like Ruby has her content pillars and I have my content pillars. I have content pillars for email as well. Yeah. And so my five content pillars that I do is the first one being quite obvious, which is promotional. And I recommend that every six to seven weeks. So you'll send out a promo email and you'll probably send out multiple in that right campaign. Yeah. A campaign. So we don't want to have too many campaigns. We want to be doing that every six to seven weeks. And then I have a content pillar called the trust email. So the trust email could go back to your TikTok or your Instagram where you're showing maybe people buying the product, your testimonials, any videos or social proof. This is like the trust content pillar. Even going back to, I've got a few clients that are really big on YouTube and just like feeding them back to their YouTube and then their YouTube feeds them back to their email list by having a lead magnet. So it's kind of like this cycle which moves around really nicely. The other one I do is the objection email. So the objection email is where you go through your FAQs, you go through your Instagram or your competitors if you've just started out and you literally just start finding questions people are asking and you write an email on it. And again, that could link out to a TikTok post where maybe you've gone out into more information or that could be a sales one because you could be like overcome in an objection that people have to sales. And then you could be like, you know, if this overcame your objection, obviously you wouldn't write that. But you'd have your CTA that goes to people buying the product or service that you're talking about. Yeah. I love that. The other one that I like to do is called the brand email. And this is simply like what are you up to as a brand? So it could just be, hey, the team went and did this or Thursday night I won the 40 under 40. Just like throwing that out there. And it's just like what it's a brand up to or we're releasing this new product, etc. Like it's in the works or whatever it is that you're up to. It just like builds up personal branding like we've spoken about a lot. Absolutely. We do this a lot within newsletter. Like I know people probably what a lot of people think newspapers are dated but people love them. Like the amount of feedback we get from customers or members in a community because they've implemented a monthly newspaper. They're a newsletter. They love to hear what's going on. They love to hear what like your podcast of the month is, your product of the month is like just lap that shit up. What they do. And then the last one is obviously your educational one. And I like to make them like a series. So we have one for a brand called Taylor and call it Taylor tip Tuesday and it's once a month where we bring out a skin tip and since we've implemented that like the open rate, I think like they usually like do random ones and it was about 18% and now everyone's like loving the Taylor tip Tuesday and it's like a 36%. So people love that repetition of like, okay, yeah, I'm going to get a little like tip in my inbox around something that I don't know what it is. They know it's coming. Love that. So we've spoken about having a clear goal. We've spoken about then our different content pillars. Then we need to think about the next thing, which is our subject lines. Now, remember, subject lines get the open. That is essentially where you should be putting a lot of your energy into and doing a lot of A, B testing and again, I have pillars around my subject lines, which I test. I've got four and my, some people get a little bit funny with me on TikTok when I spoke about this. I don't give a f like if it's working, it's working, it's working, it's working. So your first one is question. So where you ask people a question in the subject line, which I guess, depending on what it is, could get them curious, it could maybe get them to be like, oh, what is this? You're asking a question, which may be related to what's in the email or sometimes I like to make it quite vague. Yeah. So that's my first one, which brings me onto curiosity. How can you make people curious? So one that we like to do is the app symbol, then like your Instagram handle or TikTok handle mentioned you. Oh, I love that. So that just means like, people are like, what, they're like curious, what do you mean they mentioned me or like, did you see this, which is kind of a mixture between like question or curiosity. Yeah. But think about like abnormal kind of curiosity subject lines that get people like, what is this about? Yeah. Which I get it. It's some people are like, oh, it's a bit unethical. Oh, my God. I'm scared I'm over it. But I'm like, it's not like I'm scamming people into something which isn't about my brand. Just opening an email. Yeah. Like they subscribe to your email. So it's not like you're emailing completely cold people. Exactly. Scarcity. So, you know, like this won't last long or like, we've only got 10 spots or something around limited numbers or FOMO or humor. Like, humor is a great pillar that you can use, which I find works really well. So they're my four contemplatives and I would suggest that you A, B test them a lot. Also A, B test, having like emojis versus not emojis, weirdly, I find that does impact accounts. It does because I think it's based on the brand as well, like what's your brand voice? We found with like a clothing brand where we, whenever we spoke about new arrivals and we did the flame, it worked, like the flames and all that people were like, oh, it's like, it's hot. It's hot. Why that worked so well? We tried with and without a couple of times. Yeah, why is the flame worked really well? They're great. Weird. Okay. Now, a lot of people will write an email and they'll just babble on or they'll ask too many things from their audience. Yeah. So, only ask for one thing because if we're asking people in our email to like our TikTok page, go watch this video, or if you don't want to do that, go here, it confuses them. So, one action per email. So, if you want them to shop now and go to a collection page, just ask them to shop now and go to a collection page. Don't ask them to go to your TikTok to watch a video, think about one step funnel here. Mm-hmm. Now, Ruby spoke about playing text and I've got, no, no, don't be silly. For e-com, obviously imagery and the presentability of your email is super important. We know this in e-com. People love imagery, gifts, little movie videos, which is like your gifts, but like how can you visually appeal to people? And I think with e-com especially, we're really driven by how things look. Yeah. I do though want to kind of go against myself there with playing text emails working really well for e-com as well. So I think incorporating both really beautiful visual emails, especially if you're a brand where aesthetics means a lot and like people are drawn to like photos of clothing, but don't be afraid to add plain text into your strategy. I think plain text from the founder works really well. Like, not plain text from the actual brand itself. Oh, you would. We've had a couple where they do really well. Yeah, what? Right. Yeah, we have. I mean, if it's working, it's working. And especially when we're at the end of a sale period and it's the final few days we'll do a plain text. Yeah, true. And it works. And I've done it for a few brands now and I'm finding more and more that they're doing because plain text has a higher chance of ending up in your inbox. And we like to, during a sale period, have both to know that at least they're getting the emails about the sale. Yeah, true. So I'm just saying try both. And I think for service, especially coaching in that, it is quite normal to be quite plain text. Yeah. So maybe you want to have a couple that adjust up, maybe you go the opposite and just try. I do banners online. So like the banner will look really beautiful and then like the headings will be in brand colors, but yeah, I do find that plain text does convert better. I definitely think for service providers more like the coaching and consulting that it is plain text at work as well. Yeah. Personalization. I preach this so much, but we don't want to be sending out general emails. Obviously, out sale ones, we can send out, but you can actually have, especially if you come like blocks in there that are dynamic based on like maybe what people have bought before or specific blocks that you're going to recommend specific products based on buying habits. So you can get quite personal in there. I'm not just saying like change the name or hey, Maddie, but you can get personalized with what products maybe you're showing them or if you are doing a sale, maybe you could have people who have bought X product multiple times, see that banner with that product that they love. Like, see what I mean by that? Just getting a little bit deeper into your audience makes it feel like, oh, that brand is speaking to me. Like, imagine when you open up an email from your favorite brand and like, it's a sale one and the first product you're seeing, you haven't even bought before. Yeah. I don't know. True. Yeah. No, I love that. Just going a little bit extra. I want to talk about the CTA strategy. This is one I've been testing for a while. So do you know, just like people, some people like reading, some people like hearing and some people like seeing, you know, you get me, he's the way they learn. Yeah. People also convert differently. So I like to put the three times CT, this is such gold. Guys, take care. It's called the three times CTA strategy. Okay. So hear me out. You want to put your CTA on A, a picture. So imagine that you have your banner or, yeah, you know, like a banner halfway in between your email for you, maybe Ruby or Ecom will have our nice, beautiful pictures. Yeah. We want to put our CTA on there, which might be shop now, book now, whatever. So that's CTA number one. Then you want to have a button in your email that has the same call to action, but it's in the form of a circle or a rectangle. Then you want to have a written CTA like just in your email copy because what we find is people convert differently. So some people convert over the text, some people convert on the button and some people convert with an image. So putting all three in there, like almost makes it 100% certain that the person will likely convert. Absolutely. And I'm making sure that they're like peppered through the email, like correct. Yeah. We used to do it back in blog days and we'd write blogs a lot, but just making sure that they were like, if you're, every scroll, you can see that in your mobile or your computer. And you need to make sure there's one like above the scroll, like correct. Well, that's more landing page, but email as well. Yeah. Well, what we find is the image one we like to do first. At the top. Yeah. Yeah. With the shop now. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's just like, oh cool, shop now. You know, if it's like 30% off or like 100%. And it's so annoying when it's not there. Yeah. What is happening? What is happening? What is happening? Now, the story telling techniques Ruby speaks about this a lot with Instagram, but you need to have an emotional connection with your subscribers. So if you're service telling a story before you kind of go to your offer or telling a story which relates to like what you're saying, Ruby, you would know more about this, gets people really like they're on this journey with you totally. Yeah. You're going to say something. Like people have always bought into story stories ever since like nursery rhymes when you're a little like they're the things that you connect with, they're the things that you remember. And they're the things that you feel most relatable to. So you can bring more stories into any type of marketing. It's like you almost connect, I teach this in some of my programs, but connect the pain point with the solution with the story or a metaphor. But people feel like they've come up with the solution a lot more than what you've just told them to do something. So it's such a great activity to brainstorm stories and metaphors for your business and to just bring them into your marketing everywhere. Yeah, I follow this guy who's a marketer and I love his emails because he was, it's like he's speaking to me, but he's like telling a story as well, so well, but he probably sent this email out more to e-commerce that he works with. And he was like, oh, a client recently fired us and I was like, oh, I'm reading more like five. Do you see? And then he was like telling the story about how, and he was quite open, you know, him and his client had a bit of a disagreement on he was saying you should do this creative even though it's a bit off brand, rarer rise, still going to perform and the guys like, no, we wanted to be on brand and we went on and on and on and on. And then he was saying that the client ended up using the creative anyway and he was like see it ended up working, but then moral of the story was don't always sit to your brand guidelines. But see, he was telling a story about it and he used so much more hooked. I was hooked. Yeah. I was like, oh my God. Right to the end. And now the last thing I'm up to that word that I can't say really, and I was trying to say this. I don't even want to say it. I can't say this word and I did a TikTok on it and I remember before I did a TikTok, I had to listen on Google how you say it. Okay, wait a minute. Familiar arity. Did I say that right? No, because I can't say either, so I can't even help you. Familiar. Guys, I'm just going to spell it. Should we put it in Google? Familiar arity. I think people know what we're talking about. We don't know. We don't know. Familiar arity exposure, however you say it, in your email is how you can incorporate things to your subscribers might be aware of. So for example, we have a client called Taylor's skin and we decided to play off the lyrics, Taylor Swift, in some of our email content. So think about your favorite shows, like think about friends, for example, remember when the scene, pivot, pivot with a couch, imagine if you had like, pivot in there, people like resonate with that because it's something that they're used to. So having this little bit of exposure theory in your email marketing copy really gets people trusting you more because they're familiar with what you're talking about and kind of resonating your brand with. So if we go back to the Taylor Swift one, people love Taylor Swift, they trust her, they adore her. So by playing on her lyrics and putting that in our copy, it makes people then trust our brand totally because they already trust her. Yeah. So that's a great thing that you should do to boost engagement and get people familiar with your content around a topic that they're already know about. Yeah, I love that. And you can even do it by just adding like a gift in there, like a meme, yeah, and even creating your own memes. I know this is more probably more so for social media, but creating your own memes with things that are quite popular. This is a little bit off topic, but just bringing that familiar. Oh my god, let's stop saying that word, bringing, we need like a student, oh my god. All right. Maybe not before Ruby embarrassed herself more. The last thing is like having polls, quizzes or surveys to encourage engagement as well in your email, which is a great strategy. Yeah. So okay. I've given you some great strategies for creating engaging content, your overall strategy, and getting people to open the subject lines. Now, I just want to have a few points we'll keep it quick on your list. Now, remember, you should only ever, oh, people fuck this up, Ruby, one list. Yes. Multiple segments. Yes. Everyone's in one list. Yeah. And then you're going to segment people out and you should have segments galore, like any time you can think of how you can group a certain people, make a segment about it. You should have hundreds. Yeah. And maintaining a clean and engaged list is super critical. So making sure that you're not sending everything out to your list, that you have your 90 day engaged, your 60 day engaged, your 30 day engaged, your 120 day engaged, then you have your unengaged and you need to think about how to get your unengaged to your gay engagement. But you need to be testing your different kind of engagement points in your segments. But also think about like products that they buy, actions that they're taking on your website. If you've done quizzes, can you segment the mail based on their answers? Or how can you ask them things in your email to find out more about them? You're doing those quizzes within your email as well. Because once we understand our list, we can get granular within the emails that we send them and get better results. Yeah. So this is super important. You need to be having a strategy around firstly getting people off your unengaged. So that's normally we're like wind back or reply to strategies, stuff like that. But also how can I find out as much information as I can about my people to then segment them out? Yeah. Love that. That keeps a really, really super clean list and helps you get personalized with your email marketing. Simple as that. Now one question I always get asked is, should I be using like chat GPT or AI? So I just wanted to give a quick sentence on this. Yeah. So the question I get asked all the time. And a lot of people do use it. Yeah. It is a good way to get ideas for your campaign or start the flow of you thinking of ideas. I've done and a lot of marketers have there as well, done a lot of experiments with AB testing around chat GPT copy versus not even chat GPT but other ones versus human content writers. Yeah. And from what I understand, human writing still wins. Yeah. So we've got to remember that we're going to take every think of AI with a growing assault. It doesn't have storytelling or emotions. So we need to add that function in ourselves. However, it can read data for you. So you can gather, for example, all your reviews, subject lines, yeah, it can come up with subject lines. It can come up with those objections for you. For example, you could get it to scan all your reviews and say, like, what are the common sentiments of my brand and what are some objections that you think people might have or what are some things I should touch on and give you those ideas. But definitely only use it for that. I probably would write my own copy still. I think it's just like the rule of thumb that I would say with any, if you're using AI or chat GPT for anything, it's like use it as your assistance. Yeah. Don't use it as your expert. Yes. But on that note, that's my tips. Do you have anything else that you want to add there or are we covered? I think that's good. I think it's a first good entry into email marketing. I think we've spoken a lot about social. Yeah. I think emails next. I know because even for all of my clients that have or use Instagram as their core funnel, which is what I preach, I still suggest people build our email funnels and email list funnels. Yeah. So it's something that I think every business should have. How do you use it? How do you start your email list, how do you build it, how do you get more people onto it, how do you, what do you sense of them? Yeah. So maybe that's month two. Maybe we're teasing you of what month two of the subscription episodes are going to be about. I think you're linky-wink. It's a nice email. Yeah. But yeah, this is a great intro into it. So we will chat to you next week. See you then.